Seminar

Speaker

Date

Location

Smart contracts are programs that manage digital assets according
to a certain protocol, expressing for instance the rules of an
auction. Understanding the possible behaviors of a smart contract
is difficult, which complicates development, auditing, and the
post-mortem analysis ofattacks.

In this talk, I will present the first specification mining
technique for smart contracts. Our technique extracts the
possible behaviors of smart contracts from executions recorded on
a blockchain and expresses them as automata. A novel dependency
analysis allows us to separate independent interactions with a
contract. Our technique tunes the abstractions for the automata
construction automatically based on configurable metrics, for
instance, to maximize readability or precision. We implemented
our technique for the Ethereum blockchain and evaluated its
usability on several real-worldcontracts.

Maria Christakis is a tenure-track
faculty member of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
(MPI-SWS) in Germany, where she leads the “Practical Formal Methods”
Group since October 2017. She was previously a lecturer (assistant
professor) at the University of Kent, England and a post-doctoral
researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, USA. She received her
Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich,
Switzerland in 2015. Maria has been awarded with a Facebook Faculty
Research Award, the EAPLS Best PhD Dissertation Award, and the ETH
medal for her doctoralthesis.